Turn failure into success

Andy Walker
Mar 1, 2024
2 min read

(How to breath new life into failed paintings)

Everyone who paints knows about failed paintings. We all have them. And that’s quite normal. I read a statistic somewhere that said that something like 95 to 99% of all paintings are considered failures. That’s only between one and five in every hundred that you paint, that you think is worthy of the grade, something you might frame or show to others.

As for the rest – well, they are a part of our learning journey. In truth no painting is a failure because each one teaches us something new. They are only failures inasmuch as we consider them to be not our best work.

So what can we do with our “failures”?

Nobody likes waste, and if you are painting in oils or acrylics, then help is at hand. You can rescue your failures. (This is a bit more tricky for the watercolourists amongst us but you can always paint on the reverse side of a failed painting, thus saving the paper).

Here’s what I did to re-use a failure. This saved me throwing the board away and made for an interesting experiment.

Original “failed” oil painting 20 x 30cm

This is my failed painting. I knew what i was aiming for but it didn’t quite hit the mark. Now I did fiddle away at it for quite some time, but it still wasn’t going anywhere, and so I decided to just consign it to history and paint over it with a completely new picture.

The painting was quite dark and so I knocked it back with some thinned white oil paint. This obliterated most of the details and left me with an interesting underpainting, some of which was to show through the new painting. I left this to dry for a day.

2. I used ultramarine blue to block in the darks and shadows of the new painting. I tend to do this first to give the a structure to work on and to help me see if the “bones” of the painting are working. Now is the time to re-adjust, eliminate or move anything before it is too late.

3. I now tested some of my other main colours to check if they were okay and if they were the right tonal value before committing to painting too much in.